After Acquisition and Investments, Datanyze Poised for Growth

Silicon Valley startup Datanyze acquired its first competitor last month and updated its sales intelligence platform this week in moves that company officials claim will aid its growth this year.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based startup, launched in 2012 with one employee, has plans to nearly triple its workforce of 18 this year.

The projection comes on the heels of the company's acquisition of competitor LeadLedger in December and this week's announcement of Datanyze Insider, which provides sales reps company officials said with up-to-date information on prospects during each step of the lead-generation process.

Acquisition Boost

The LeadLedger buy should allow Datanyze to help sales reps secure more leads, particularly in the advertising space.

"LeadLedger was competing with us on the lower end," said Ilya Semin, founder and CEO of Datanyze. "It was a strategic move for us to eliminate a competitor and prevent larger competitors from entering this space."

Backed by summer 2014 investments from Google Ventures, Mark Cuban and others, Datanyze officials said they have a "product roadmap" for 2015 that will support the employee-growth projection. Semin said the company's revenue grew 500 percent in 2014.

Datanyze crawls websites to see who's using what technologies. It covers at least 30 technology categories. For example, someone that's started a free HubSpot marketing automation trial, then Marketo may want to know.

"It's a good time for Marketo, which is an actual Datanyze customer,to reach out to these guys. There's no better time," said Semin, a former senior engineer at Nokia. "You know they need your solutions right now so you can intercept the prospects from your competitors. And there's a very good chance of closing this prospect because you know there is a need for a solution like yours."

That technology's out there. So what stands out here?

"We think our competitors' solutions are very old-fashioned and out-of-date," Semin said. "What they do is they sell you lists. The problem with lists is that lists are out-of-date immediately. The big differentiator for us is the updated information. We crawl websites daily. Our information is 100 percent up-to-date, and we verify email addresses on the actual domain before we share it so it's 100 percent correct. We're in the business of selling data, and it's very important to have up-to-date, accurate information, otherwise we're not in business anymore."